Driven Mad
by Mandination
Summary: In the 51st century, death doesn't always mean the end of things. It's been quiet around the hub lately, but that never lasts long, does it? - A closer look at the Time Agency and how it got shut down.
1. Chasing Weevils

They were always bloody running.

Gwen could feel the tingling fire up her calves with every step. It was the silent plea of her poor overworked muscles for some much needed rest, but she pressed on, fighting to ignore it. She could feel herself sucking at the air, unable to get enough oxygen in her lungs, but she fought not to focus on that. Her arms pumped furiously in an attempt to increase her momentum and propel herself forward faster. After Jack.

Hell. He'd told her, once, that she'd never get tired of following him, but she was damn tired now. Following him just made her fatigue more pronounced. He moved with such seeming ease and grace, though Gwen, glaring at his figure up ahead, wrote it off to the way his flashy greatcoat billowed out behind him. She was sure that if she got close enough, she'd see he was panting and sweating with as much effort as she was. He ought to be sweating in that bloody coat.

Stubbornly, Gwen tried her best to ignore the aches and focus on the chase at hand. She found it a bit comforting to know that with all the damn running they did in Torchwood that she wasn't likely to ever need to hit the gym again. She chanced a quick glance back, over her shoulder, at Owen, who was bringing up the rear. It was a little satisfying to see he was flushed, face screwed up in a mixed expression of concentration and pain, making it clear he was struggling at least as much as she was. Probably more. Although she found that Jack's playful criticisms of Owen's physique were off their mark, she had to wonder that Owen ought to hit the gym a bit more. He wasn't out, lately, as much as she and Jack were.

Always bloody running.

Things had been slow lately. Quiet. Gwen wasn't one to look a gift horse in the mouth, but she was getting that familiar little itch, the one that urged her to get out there on the field and do something. Something other than chase after Weevils. It wasn't that the creatures' population was on the upswing in Cardiff or anything of the sort - no, even that would have been a bit more interesting than the current state of things - but with the down time lately, the most productive thing to do was chase down every bloody Weevil in Cardiff. That entailed a great deal of running.

Gwen regretted, again, frowning upon the down time. It was nice, really. She got to have some time with Rhys. They got to go out again, to dinners, sometimes with friends, and they actually got to have proper sit downs without being interrupted by Gwen's cell.

Gwen's thoughts had gotten away from her and she was jarred back into reality when she realized that Jack had abruptly stopped. She narrowly avoided colliding with his back and nearly fell off balance, arms out, wheeling cartoonishly as she fought to catch her balance.

Recovering, she forced herself to stand up straight despite her incredible urge to double over or collapse on the ground to catch her breath. Jack didn't even seemed winded. Bastard. His arm was extended, gun steadily pointed up ahead. She followed with her eyes, a frown drawing over her features. There, on the ground, was the crumpled body of the Weevil they'd been after.

"It's dead," she huffed, sounding more disappointed than she'd meant. Behind her, Owen's shoes still pounded the pavement. He slowed, jogging up to join them, breathing too heavily to comment on the situation.

"She's not," Jack said softly, no hint of exertion on his voice. Gwen looked again and she could see, crouching in the shadows next to the body of the Weevil, what looked to be a woman. Jack advanced, gun still aimed, until they were close enough to properly see.

It was a petite woman, looked to be around Gwen's own age. Her hair was dark and long, unkempt in a way that made her look a bit attractive. Not that Gwen was attracted to her. But she WAS beautiful. Hell. The woman wore something Gwen would call a sundress, with a long, over-sized coat on top of it. She had soft features that were set in a dull expression that Gwen would identify as shock. After surveying the woman, Gwen shot Jack a disapproving little glare before reaching and forcing him to lower his gun. He frowned.

"It was so young. So young..." The woman spoke, drawing their attention again. "And lost. And sad. It was just hungry. It didn't know. _Didn't know_. Just hungry and alone... It hadn't met them yet, they felt him and tried to find him but they weren't quick because of the big black wheels and they couldn't, then. They would have told him. He _didn't know_. Thought I was food. Didn't know... Couldn't smell it on me like they could. _Didn't know _I wasn't okay. I had to. He's dead. _I had to_."

The tone of her voice was as flat and dull as her expression, confirming Gwen's suspicion of shock. She started forward and was nearly clothes-lined by Jack's suddenly outstretched arm. He stopped her in her tracks. "How did you kill it?"

Gaze still trained on the Weevil, the girl raised a slender arm, extending it out at Jack, her aim perfect despite having not looked. The sleeve of her over-sized coat fell away and Gwen found herself staring down the barrel of a sort of gun she didn't quite recognize. She thought Jack might, the way he stiffened suddenly, but she supposed that was the common sense reaction, then, when put under the point of a gun.

"There's no need to get violent," Jack said, carefully, that certain soothing tone to his voice that he sometimes adopted in high stress situations.

The woman looked up, her eyes meeting his now. Her lips curled into a smile. "It dreamt it was a banana once."

Gwen's brows furrowed and Owen asked the question on her mind. "The weevil?"

The woman giggled girlishly, waggling the gun around. She was still looking at Jack - only Jack. "Don't you remember? You were in the dream, too."

"Can't say I do," Jack said. Gwen cast a side-long glance at him, checking his face, and she was baffled to see an odd sort of remembrance in his eyes. "Put the weapon down."

The woman frowned, getting to her feet now. She walked a pace or two closer and Gwen backed up, but Jack stood his ground. The woman offered the weapon to Jack and he stepped in to take it. "Battery's dead," she said, mournfully. "There's a banana grove there, now. It would have been happier as a banana. It really liked the dream."

Jack frowned, examining the gun. "Sonic blaster," he said, for the benefit of Owen and Gwen. He shook his head, regarding the mystery woman. "Where did you get this?"

She shook her head. "It's not yours. He was yours," she gestured at the dead Weevil, "but it's not yours. It didn't come like he did. I didn't come like he did."

"What do you mean? Jack, what does she mean?" Owen asked.

The woman grinned now, playfully and said, in a terrible American accent that must have been her best impersonation of Jack, "I'm not from around these parts."

A/N: Wow. Okay, so, I debated for a long time whether or not to start posting up this story, and I finally decided to bite the bullet. (Personally, I'm pretty happy with it, but I think I went overboard on the banana joke.)

Mild spoilers in the rest of my note.

Anyway, this was a plot I hashed out back at the end of Season 1. I'd abandoned it in Season 2 because John was introduced, and this story was based on the fact that we didn't know anything about the Time Agency. It was original back when I thought it up, I swear. X). I decided to go ahead with it anyway, already put too much work into it to just let it rot.

Pairings will be pretty canon, Jack/Ianto because I'm a shipper, Gwen/Rhys and the awkward never-quite-Tosh/Owen that frustrates us all to no end. Rated for language, mostly.

Not anticipating many spoilers, but I'll head the chapters with warnings.

OC is mine, everything else is not. Not even the banana. Reviews are love.


	2. The Time Agent

A/N: Thanks for the reviews! Tried this chapter out in first person, changed my mind, so it took a while, sorry. Next chapter should be a little quicker, although it's a bit Owen-centric (in the same manner the first chapter was Gwen-centric,) which I'm a little nervous about...

Basically, some background for the OC here. She gets a name, and the back story starts to build. In the next chapter, Torchwood's back and they'll get to learn a bit more about what's going on.

No spoilers, (well, technically, there's some light spoilers for Last of the Time Lords, S3E13 of Doctor Who, but you probably wouldn't notice unless I pointed it out,) usual disclaimers apply (OC is mine, but the Time Agency is not,) I heart reviews, and all that.

The poster boy. She'd noticed him, how could she not? He was, at a point, the face of the Time Agency, the picture perfect cadet that everyone who joined up should strive to be. She forgot, wrapped up in her own life and never having known him, but meeting him again down the line, she'd remember. Dark hair, blue eyes, chiseled jaw, that build... she'd recall eyeing the poster the first time she saw it, an advertisement, 'come join the Time Agency,' or something to that effect, but more alluring and more forceful. She'd been with friends, two or three whose names would fade from memory by the time she saw him again, but she'd remember laughing with them at the poster. It had been cheesy, too forced to be real. She'd suspected he was a model, because, honestly, what Time Agent would look like that? Her friends, she'd recall, had snubbed the action and adventure the Time Agency had promised, but secretly, that poster and that poster boy had started a slow-building fire in her gut.

Four years after seeing it, she'd signed on with the Time Agency, having already forgotten, by that point, that it was the advertisement that planted the idea in her mind in the first place. By then, she had new friends, friends who encouraged her joining and tried to sign up with her. Their names, too, would be forgotten, because everything before joining became hazy and unimportant. None of them made it, anyway. They probably lived boring, ordinary lives - the sort of lives, by the way, that she'd once felt she was sworn to protect but somewhere along the line forgot she gave a damn about.

The work was consuming. The action and adventure that the Time Agency promised was delivered, tenfold. It wasn't a job, as she'd imagined, but, rather, it was a life in itself. And she was good at living that life, she felt she was meant for it. Every completed mission was met by pats on the back from her superiors and promises of promotions in the near future. She was full of ego, then, really believing she was a shining star among the rest of the recruits. She was quick-witted and sure-footed and she believed in herself. There was no doubt that she'd rise through the ranks. She absently dreamed, at times, of one day rising to the very top of the Time Agency. It was a pipe dream, she always knew that, but she grasped at anything that gave her efforts more meaning. She found herself living, not unhappily, for those pats on the back.

The 51st century. Oh, it was grand. As in any time, there were people who just never felt like they belonged, but not her. She knew she'd been born in the right place. She knew she'd fallen into the right line of work, because she took to it like a fish to water. It was almost as if she'd been bred to be a Time Agent. She was never one to ponder on the meaning of life and the whys and hows of where she was and what she was doing. She had her purpose set out in front of her. She carried it with her as a device strapped to her wrist, as the uniform she wore when the occasion called for it. She was a soldier with a bright future, why question any of it?

Molly Carter - was that her name, her real name? After assuming so many fake identities, they seemed to blur together to the point where she wasn't sure if Molly was something given to her, or something she'd taken and favored to the point she made it her own. She never questioned her fuzzy memories, because she was content, like the other good soldiers, to live her life in the present. (So to speak, anyway, as she actually lived her life jumping around between the present, future and past.) Some of them suddenly realized they had no idea who they were, some of them recognized changes in procedure, but she always trusted her superiors. They gave her the details she needed to know, and she was happy with that. Why waste the energy delving deeper? Why grasp at straws? She was Molly Carter and whether her parents or the Time Agency had made her that didn't matter.

She was something special and she was going to be someone to answer to some day, she really was. But then, as countless Time Agents before her had, (the ones that nobody counted nor remembered,) she died.

So many times, she'd near as shaken hands with Death, then gone on her merry way. She was used to danger. She was used to bullets whizzing past her ear or sticking in her shoulder. She didn't waver under the barrel of a gun and it was something she recognized a strength. She kept her wits in the face of danger, because how else would she get out of a bad situation? How could she carry out her missions if someone waving a gun about reduced her to a useless, quivering mess of tears? She didn't lose her confidence, faced with certain death. In fact, she operated best under the worst of terms.

It was such a shock to her to have her charms resisted. She'd talked her way out of death more times than she could count, she'd flirted her way in and out of prisons, wars and beds of government officials. It was all part of the training, after all. Negotiation, seduction... she knew how to use the tools nature and the Time Agency had equipped her with. But she was still human, and maybe she'd faltered in the face of that shock.

It hardly mattered, really. When there was a bullet lodged in her heart, nothing much mattered. She'd failed, she was going to die, and, likely, no one but her superior would ever know. People who have had near-death experiences often say that their last thoughts were of concern for their loved ones, or that their entire life flashed before their eyes. Perhaps that's not always true. Perhaps, for people coming back from the brink, it's just a way to ensure that when they do leave the world, they're remebered as good and empathetic, or as someone who lived a full life and regretted nothing. There's something so human about wanting a dignified death and profound last words and thoughts. Maybe, at the end, some people draw upon this need and determination and find some strength within them to grant that last wish.

Maybe that sometimes is the case. Certainly, though, it's not always. Molly's dying thoughts were not of her past, not of her failures or successes, nor of any friends or loved ones. (And at this point, did she even have any of the latter? Not really. Her parents were but a hazy memory, and the idea of a relationship was something laughable in her line of work.) She wasn't wondering what would happen when she drew her last breath. Her mind was pleasantly blank as it occurred. She felt satisfied, as if she'd reached the end of her journey. She'd always been living the life she knew she was meant to live, and then, she felt as if she was dying the death she was destined for.

In fact, it was true. Molly Carter, as she came to be known, was meant to die that day. No one could know what dictated that, but there were people who were anticipating it, planning for it, watching her every move and waiting until the time was right. Her death would signal the beginning of dreams being realized for them. It had taken a lot of hard work for Molly to die as she did, and although she sucked in her last breath and her heart beat for the last time, a lot more work would be put into her before she was done.


End file.
